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The Total Orientation Trip for Earth and Mineral Sciences is an experience designed to help new students overcome freshmen jitters through activities like boating and swimming, cooking challenges and scavenger hunts.

It is hard to surpass a seemingly impossible goal but with dedication and hard work that is what the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) THON team did. For the fifth year in a row, the EMS THON raised the largest amount among general organizations for The Four Diamonds, fighting pediatric cancer. This year they raised $137,763.29, smashing last year's record-breaking total of $110,114.67.

Eight Penn State undergraduate student research teams from five campuses will represent Penn State as the largest Pennsylvania college or university contingent at the Capitol Rotunda Tuesday morning (March 3) in Harrisburg. They will present their research with students from more than 100 Pennsylvania colleges and universities as part of the Undergraduate Research at the Capitol-Pennsylvania event.

“Today we’re on the threshold of dramatic changes that, if we address and identify correctly, will enable us to make forecasts even more accurately, more localized, more relevant as we go into the future. This will enable people to better utilize and benefit from weather information, adding to the value of information of what we provide, saving lives, protecting property, improving the health of the economy and the health and welfare of people and their quality of life.” Joel N. Myers, AccuWeather founder and president, speaking Thursday (Feb. 26) on Penn State’s University Park campus.

The recent slowdown in climate warming is due, at least in part, to natural oscillations in the climate, according to a team of climate scientists, who add that these oscillations represent variability internal to the climate system. They do not signal any slowdown in human-caused global warming.

William F. Hederman Jr., deputy director for systems integration and senior adviser to the secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), will be giving the talk “Lessons from the First Quadrennial Energy Review Important Trends, Challenges and Recommendations” on Wednesday, March 4.

Fifty years ago, WPSU-TV went on the air for the first time. Students and teachers who turned on their televisions for the initial broadcast watched “Saludos Amigos,” an introductory Spanish class aimed at schoolchildren across central Pennsylvania.

Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has been elected a 2015 Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the nation's leading professional society for scientists in the atmospheric and related sciences.

Penn State President Eric Barron joined the Penn State Alumni Association to host an engaging alumni-focused gathering on Wednesday Feb. 11 in Houston at the Four Seasons Hotel Houston. The event started with breakfast hosted by Barron and his wife Molly and was followed by a panel discussion with Barron and alumni from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences titled “How Will Current and Likely Future Trends Change the Energy Industry?” William Easterling, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, served as moderator.

The "Hockey Stick" graph, a simple plot representing temperature over time, led to the center of the larger debate on climate change, and skewed the trajectory of at least one researcher, according to Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology, Penn State.

As much as 75 percent of global seed diversity in staple food crops is held and actively used by a wide range of small farmholders -- workers of less than three to seven acres -- with the rest in gene banks, according to a Penn State geographer.